


Lotus Eater

by bobtailsquid



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Angst and Fluff and Smut, M/M, Post-Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions, Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions Compliant, and atem is like, kaiba's like i figured it out! repressing feelings is bad, sounds fake
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-17 09:47:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29348385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bobtailsquid/pseuds/bobtailsquid
Summary: With his time in the Netherworld coming to an end, Seto gives Atem a choice he never thought he'd have.
Relationships: Atem/Kaiba Seto, Kaiba Seto/Yami Yuugi | Atem
Comments: 22
Kudos: 38
Collections: Dark Valentines of Dimensions 2021





	Lotus Eater

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DarkIceAngelFlare](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarkIceAngelFlare/gifts).



> **ODYSSEY BOOK 9 LINE 82:**  
>  _Thence for nine days' space I was borne by direful winds over the teeming deep; but on the tenth we set foot on the land of the Lotus-eaters, who eat a flowery food... two men I chose, sending with them a third as a herald. So they went straightway and mingled with the Lotus-eaters, and the Lotus-eaters did not plan death for my comrades, but gave them of the lotus to taste. And whosoever of them ate of the honey-sweet fruit of the lotus, had no longer any wish to bring back word or to return, but there they were fain to abide among the Lotus-eaters, feeding on the lotus, and forgetful of their homeward way..._  
>    
> Set several (???) after the ending of DSOD. No content warnings save for a brief mention/description of suicide.
> 
> Hope you enjoy the meal 🍜🌺

The afternoon was lazy and indulgent, even by the standards of a world designed by divine hands for the sole purpose of lazy indulgence.

Atem and Seto lay on the cushions of the barge, listening to the gentle, rhythmic kisses of river waves along its prow. Its four-postered canopy shaded them from the hot sun. The quiet was punctuated only by the occasional creak of the oars, not a period but a comma, carrying them farther, farther, farther down the River. They’d packed a basket of food and a senet board and fled the palace for a day of drifting – however long a day lasted. On either side of them were the massive, sprawling tapestries of the desert cliffs, tasseled with a fringe of palm trees along the shore. On the water, tucked into secret, rocky pockets, floated blue lilies, their luminous, petal-bladed baskets glowing with fragrance.

Seto was indulging in his new favorite game of Touching Atem, lying twisted at the waist like a möbius strip, back flat and hips tilted. Every touch came safely shielded behind a stern veneer of scientific curiosity. Observe: the shape of Atem’s hand. Four narrow, bony fingers fanning out from a shallow palm, each one tipped with sharp, well-kept white crescents. A hitch-hiker's thumb, going nowhere. He held Atem’s hand over his face and studied every angle of bone and sinewed vector with the scrutiny he gave everything – with the white-blue-black of his eyes sitting between his lashes like the deep cuts between glaciers, glowing with light and just as cold. It was dangerous to fall into them. Atem's heart floated in his chest, in reflection of the way his barge floated on the River – aimless, idle, bathed in light. 

"Seto," Atem said, "can you explain to Mahad what a tomato tastes like?"

That was _his_ new favorite game: Tell Me, usually played over a fountain-side meal of beer and honey-roasted gazelle in the gardens, under a long, rose-colored dusk. Tell me about the modern world. What happens inside a black hole, and why. What's the difference between something _infinite_ and something _infinitesimal?_ (They sacrificed a stack of papyrus, in Thoth's name, to that one.) What is the greatest work of art? I know it's a matter of opinion. I'm asking _yours_. Every question testing Seto's vast intellect. It was a well-matched myth: a man with unslakable thirst, drinking from an inexhaustible spring.

It was also a game that frustrated Mahad, mostly because Seto always found a way to make him lose. _Oh, damn you and all your conjurer’s tricks to Ammut,_ Seto would say, laughing, using his bare foot to send spirals through the still waters. _You work your heka without asking HOW it works, and that’s your own fault. But as I was saying, there are four main components to a rocket. First, propulsion –_

"A tomato? Why a tomato?" Seto said, without pausing in his investigation. Question: with all five senses. He saw, he touched, he tasted, pressing Atem’s hand to his mouth, lips moving with butterfly-wing delicacy from the round of his wrist into his palm, curling each finger for a damp kiss. The smell of river water and susinum, fresh and sweet, an undertone of wood and cinnamon.

"I'm in the mood for a burger," Atem said, enjoying the shiver as his knuckle dipped between Seto's lips. "We have the lettuce, the bread, the meat, the onions. But he hasn't been able to - conjure up a tomato, I suppose. He can't imagine it. We didn't have those in Egypt, in our time."

"Yes, tomatoes are from South America," Seto murmured, a little unhelpfully, since Mahad was also unfamiliar with the concept of South America, but Atem also knew he was just describing the nature of the problem. "I can explain tonight, if he doesn't have another… special event planned for you."

Atem's kingdom in Aaru was not one that needed ruling, in any conventional sense. There were no other kingdoms to war against, no conspiracies among the courtiers, no monuments that needed mending. No policies to argue and enact. The River swelled like clockwork to just the right height and depth, never a drop more. The feasting was unending. The gardens were always wet and lush. The ushabtis kept the fields well-tended. So Atem left it to Mahad to devise the thorny political conundrums that amused him, cast with other denizens of the Field of Reeds, with solutions that required more subtlety than merely summoning the strongest of gods.

"If he does, it's a surprise," Atem said. "You know. Like a _real_ crisis."

"Is there anything else you need me to explain to him?"

"Just tomatoes," Atem said lightly. "Aaru's fatal flaw. No tomatoes."

He meant it as a joke. Paradise had no flaws.

Seto responded only with silence.

His investigation continued onto the last sense: hearing. He pulled Atem's hand around his face to his ear, as though listening to a seashell, and left it there, his cheek curving into Atem's palm, his gaze drifting into the middle distance.

Atem went still, struck by both the quiet and the look on Seto's face, a slowly-gathering cloud. He'd been radiant ever since he arrived, tracking in sand, and even more so as they dueled, and most of all when Atem crossed the great hall, lifted his hands in imitation of a temple offering, and kissed that stunned look of victory off his silly handsome face.

Mahad said he sounded like a man come home. The white linen of his shendyt fit perfectly around his trim waist, his hieratic script had a brocade delicacy; all the old love songs nested like birds in his mouth, preened and feathery and ready to fly.

Seto heaved a sigh, a steely, heavy sound of resolve. 

“Atem,” he said, his voice filling the space between them. Atem still had his hand on his cheek, giving it light strokes with his thumb. “I can’t stay here much longer.”

“What?” Atem said, starting, half-rising on his elbows, and cursed his own surprise. He should’ve expected this, at some point.

“Look,” Seto said. He lifted his hand, stroking the air with a slow half-turn. Golden sparks flared up and out in the wake of his fingertips, oddly bright despite the clear summer air. His fingertips themselves had a strange quality, the whorls as dark-blue and translucent as spilled ink. Atem’s stomach flipped with anxiety, a bizarrely alive sensation, one he’d almost forgotten. The seams between Seto and this dimension were starting to split. 

“Mahad can fix it. Right?” he said. Every so often, Mahad pulled Seto aside for some unknown, arcane ritual on the edge of the desert, on the edge of dusk, something Atem wasn’t allowed to see. A heka from the first dawning of Amun. And every time Mahad came back drawn and exhausted, Seto’s footsteps making strong dents in the sand under the weight of both his own presence and the presence of Mahad’s arm slung across his shoulders. 

“He can only do so much. All his heka so far has only put off the inevitable,” Seto said, waving his hand through the air, scooping up sparks and releasing them like fireflies. His eyes were more curious than concerned, as though fascinated by the way he was magically decaying. That was the kind of instinct, Atem imagined, that made it easy to fly jets or traverse dimensions: a carefully-measured distance from the self. 

“How much time do you have left?”

“I don’t know. Mahad needs to cast his spell more and more often the longer I stay. But at this rate, I estimate we’ll both be drained within a week or so."

Atem sat upright, startling. “A _week?!”_

"Maybe sooner. Rationally speaking, I should leave in the Dimension ship, while I'm still intact, instead of testing the limits of my own dissolving..."

He lifted his hand, frowned, and snapped his fingers once – a shower of sparks burst out from the snap, in a silent, shimmering, fist-sized firework. He snorted under his breath, satisfied. A fascinating little experiment, with self-destruction as side-effect – so much for speaking rationally. He braced his thumb against his middle finger for another - 

_"Don't,"_ Atem said, seizing his hand from the air. They stared at each other, startled by how easy it was now to just reach out and _touch,_ on a whim, just because they felt like it. 

He let go. Seto slowly withdrew his hand. 

"If you only have a week... wait,” Atem said. “How long have you been here?”

“About seventeen days. I checked this morning.”

"Checked what? How?"

"The nuclear clock on the Dimension ship. It’s working perfectly," Seto said. "Do you still have a functional sense of time? Probably not… why would you? There's no point here."

He spoke mostly to himself, in an idle half-mutter.

Atem bit his tongue, swallowing a vague disappointment, which was supposed to be impossible. That was true: he had no sense of time here, not in any meaningful sense. Time here was continuous, not discrete, with the texture of wet taffy, oozing through his hands, big drops of time growing fat at the end of a long, stretching rope, second by uncountable second. The afternoons lasted decades. Every night lasted a lifetime, or a few minutes, however long Atem chose, depending on how soon he wanted to wake up next to Seto again, sweat dried on their skins and love-bites blossoming on their necks, the only bruises allowed by the rules of Aaru.

"How has it only been only seventeen days?" he said. "That feels so... mundane. That feels like nothing."

Seto sat up, pulling his legs underneath him to kneel on the cushions, hands curled on his muscular linen-draped thighs. Behind him were the copper-red desert cliffs, looming high over the River, under a fathomless sky marbled with wispy white clouds, just how Atem liked it. The sun was high enough that the barge canopy left them both in shadow.

“Don’t make that face,” he said, his expression cool but gentle, like ice pressed to a burn. "You and I both know I can’t stay. This is already more than I dared to hope for.”

Right. Of course. Seto was alive. Atem was dead. Even in the land of death Seto was changing, a little more vibrant with every touch, smiling more, laughing more, and Atem was still just Atem.

“Since when do _you ‘_ dare to hope’ for anything?” Atem said sourly. “You just figure out what you want, and you find a way to get it.”

With a huff, Seto summoned his patience. “I’m willing to admit luck is part of the reason this wasn’t a one-way trip for me.”

“Oh, how grand of you. Truly, magnanimous,” Atem said, his frustration bubbling up, hot and frothing. “I’m sorry the idea of being here with me is so unpleasant that you count yourself _lucky_ to have an exit – ”

“Don’t mistake me,” Seto snapped, an irascible scissor-cut across the thread of his rant. “It doesn’t mean nothing to me that I’m here, and you know that.”

Atem clamped his teeth down on his rising protest. With a stiff resentment he rolled his eyes towards the River, watching the current slide by, the dark green waters glinting with strands of silvery-white sunlight. It was almost too easy to blame Seto for his disappointment, and for the dismal little line of dusk he saw on the horizon. Getting cut off, _again,_ from who he loved - he buried the thought, slammed the stone door on it, left it no offerings. There was no point in thinking about that.

His head was starting to hurt. That was also supposed to be impossible. Another antinomy of paradise, where death was supposed to flow into eternity, smooth and untangled and seamless...

“I’m only giving you fair warning that sooner or later, I'm leaving,” Seto said, with a slight edge to his precise, careful tone. The warning Atem hadn’t given him. “I want to keep seeing you. I want to – to keep _being_ with you. But if the only solution I have is relying on someone else, then that's not a solution.”

“Okay,” Atem said quietly. Even Seto’s brief stumble hadn’t blunted the sharp honesty of his desire. “Alright. I understand. I just…”

He bit his lip, wrapping his hands under his ankle, thinking. Reaching into the churning river of emotion coursing through him for the stone of it. 

“I don’t want this to be the only time we have with each other,” he said, finally, “before... _you_ die. And even that's not a guarantee. What if you die, and your soul goes somewhere else, somewhere that's not _here._..”

“It’s my turn for questions,” Seto said, without bite, and Atem fell silent. “We have three options. First, I go, and I don’t come back until I die. As you said, there’s no guarantee with that one. Second, I go, and I keep coming back the way I came. Now that I know it’s possible, all I have to do is perfect it. That will take a considerable amount of time and work, not to mention the risk to me, but it _can_ be done and I _will_ do it. Third – ”

He’d spoken mostly to the River, gaming out the course of his life with cool, studied indifference, looking at his hands as he crafted possibilities out of thin air. Now he fixed a sharp look on Atem, the kind of chin-down, eyes-up look he gave him from under his brows when he played a card that was one part strategy, two parts dare, a gauntlet thrown to Atem’s feet.

“I go," he said, "and you come back with me.”

Atem’s mouth fell open. He snapped it shut. 

“As far as I’m concerned, the first is a no-go,” Seto said. “And if you want to stay here in – ” he tossed his hand – “paradise, that’s your choice. But if you want to come back, I’ll find a way to make it work.”

So bold and so casual all at once, as if he had not just announced the keystone bearing the weight of the whole proposition. _Find a way to make it work_ could mean anything from making sure he didn’t dissolve away like Seto to the missed-bus banalities of modern life to twenty years from now, falling asleep with their backs turned after boring sex. The nerve of it – the arrogance! – was enthralling. And it all felt entirely justified.

“You make paradise sound like a dumpster in an alleyway,” Atem said.

“It’s hardly a _dumpster._ But it’s not to my taste,” Seto said. Atem’s skepticism must've been clear in his expression because Seto swung his head around, making a slow, thoughtful survey of the landscape. He nodded towards the top of the nearest cliff, a looming wall of craggy sandstone. “If I climbed to the top of that cliff and jumped, and splattered myself all over the rocks below – would I die? Would it hurt?”

“No,” Atem said, with a small flinch in his stomach. Of all hypotheticals, Seto chose _that_ one. “You’d just... walk it off. Wake up intact somewhere. Maybe you'd bounce.”

Seto ignored the attempt at levity. “If I shoved one of the ushabtis to the ground, would they protest? Would I be punished?”

“No, they’re ceramic,” Atem said. “They’re like your computer programs. They’re programmed for a specific function.”

“Their material shouldn't excuse it, given _you_ were once made of gold,” Seto said, “but I digress. When Mahad stages another assassination attempt, and the assassin is revealed to be one of the dignitaries from Canaan, do you think you’ll go to war again? Knowing how much was destroyed last time, and how many of your soldiers you lost in the attempt?”

“It’s just a game,” Atem said irritably, stung by his defeat. Isis had been a particularly cunning opponent in that little war game. “It’s like it didn’t even happen. There were no real stakes. Everything was restored afterwards.”

“Think about it,” Seto said.

“I…” Atem started, and stopped. To think about it.

Something turned over in his gut. Of course Seto was unimpressed.

Atem flung his gaze out over the River, as thick and rich and throbbing as an artery, teeming with fish that were always juicy and plump, their scales polished to mercury silver as they wriggled at the end of a spear, flowing under a sky without seasons, every dusk and dawn cycling through an endless early summer. His favorite time of year. He sucked in a short, quick breath, not nearly deep enough to reach the suffocated misery clenching at the bottom of his chest, and tried again, deeper. 

An absurdity came to him as he let the grief breathe, open-mouthed, eyes growing hot: yes, the afterlife was like a game, a video game with endless lives. You die, and you return right back to where you started, in a world hand-crafted just for you, every pixel rendered to perfection. 

_“Can_ I go back?” he said, at last. “This is where I _should_ be.”

“Is it?”

“But I’m – home, right? I’m _supposed_ to be here,” Atem said, struggling to control the splintering in his throat. “That was the whole point. This is what I deserved. To leave everyone behind and go home. Isn't that why Yuugi won?"

"I assumed he won because of a card game strategy."

"How can I just go back? After all of that? Then what was it all for?!"

“Atem, do what you want," Seto said, with a testy patience.

Infuriating reply! Since when did he have no opinion? Unless he was playing some kind of game?! 

“It doesn’t matter what I want!” Atem snapped. “You’re _so_ – you think you can just _uproot_ me – ”

Seto scowled at him. “‘Uproot?’ I’m offering you a choice – ”

“This is what all my friends wanted for me! To be where I belong!” 

“What they _wanted,_ past tense, has nothing to do with what you want now, _present_ tense – ”

“They’re happy where they are, and I’m happy here, and you have the sheer fucking audacity to tell me it was a mistake and maybe we shouldn’t be!” Atem said, voice rising. “You’re like a battering ram! Do you ever think twice before you barrel yourself through a wall, or is making a mess of everything part of the fun for you?!”

Seto said nothing, motionless, with a posture as proud and perfect as the scribes painted on the walls of their tombs. Atem jerked his gaze away, fuming, teeth clenched, staring down the River, wondering what spring it came from, what ocean it emptied into. 

“I don’t have any interest in taking a bite of that pathetic bait,” Seto growled, and another hellish emotion found its way back to Atem: a sting of shame. 

But then Seto dismissed it all with a humorless laugh under his breath. “I like that you’re angry. It means this is all... touching a nerve.”

Atem grimaced, still looking at the River instead of Seto. Maybe there was some great, churning chaos beyond the shimmering desert-mirage boundaries of this world, and it was not his gods but only his fear that kept him from finding it.

“Setting aside all of that, and the fact that I have said, by my figuring, _none_ of those things,” Seto said, “what makes you think Yuugi is happy without you?”

"I – he has to be. Isn't he?" Atem said desperately, with another hitch in his chest at the thought of Yuugi, sweet, fiery Yuugi, whose love for others was matched only by his quiet rage at the violence they suffered… it was so easy not to think here, to submerge and forget... Yuugi who loved him, Yuugi who won. He had to be happy with that. 

"I won't speak for Yuugi," Seto said. 

_"Is_ he?"

"You saw him, didn't you? You should know. You'd know better than I would."

Yes, he'd seen Yuugi - but only his sweet, resilient smile, telling him to go in peace. Always thinking about others. Never himself.

"Seto – " Atem was finding it hard to speak, his emotions fighting against heaven itself, his body their battleground. His throat wrenched, the air twisting out. _"Tell me._ Is he happy without me?"

"I will speak only for myself," Seto said stonily. And those particular words had already been spoken between them. Bastard! The compassion of his refusal was not lost on Atem. To say no was to open the floodgates on regret, and submerge two people in misery. To say yes was only cruelty, a subtle, severing violence. He'd cast his own line with masterful tact: the only way for Atem to know was to return and ask Yuugi himself. 

For a moment, they were both quiet.

"Are _you_ happy without him?" Seto said. "Before I got here – were you happy?"

“This is paradise,” Atem said, in hapless counterattack. 

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“What does it matter to you?! You came, you got what you wanted, and now you’re leaving – ”

“Why do you insist on tilting at windmills?!” Seto said savagely. “Do you really believe I’m here on some... vacation? You know what I left behind to get here. You know _who_ I left behind! Don’t fuck with my feelings just because you’re unsure of yours! Of course it matters to me. _You_ matter to me! Just tell me what you want!” 

Their eyes locked, Seto’s jaw muscles clenching with restrained frustration, Atem forcing himself not to look away from that lustrous blue. Should’ve never allowed him into Aaru. Should’ve known he was going to bash in the bars of the gilded cage, one by one… 

He opened his mouth, but could not think of a single thing he wanted, except, for fuck's sake, a burger, and a chocolate shake from Burger World, and he couldn't tell if it was remnants of Yuugi's own love for burgers that made him want it or if it was something else entirely, a feeling of being squished between his friends at Burger World with the greasy thing in front of him, nothing to do but eat and drink and make merry. Shoot the shit together until the night ends and we all walk home. Wasn't that what he was doing here? No end to the feasting. That's what this place was _for..._ But also some well-salted fries, for dipping in the shake... Jounouchi’s favorite clashing monstrosity of flavors, one that Atem had never found all that convincing. Maybe with that one... Mahad might succeed?

After a moment, Seto pressed a sigh through his nose.

“Unless you don’t know what you want,” he ventured, by way of peace offering. “We can figure that out.”

So practical. Atem looked down at his hands, studying them, wondering what Seto had found so fascinating. They were just hands: plainly proportioned, a little knobby. Not like Yuugi’s, well-shaped and strong...

“Or you think you can’t have it,” Seto tried again. “I’m telling you that you can.”

They had all stood there and watched him go. All of them except Seto, because he wasn't there, because Atem knew this would happen.

There was a wet heat in his eyes. He lifted a hand and pressed it away.

"Atem," Seto said, in an odd, soft counterpoint to the usual discordance of his tongue. Atem lifted his eyes to see Seto leaning towards him, his sun-browned shoulders silhouetted by desert and sky, reaching out with both hands. "Did anyone _ask_ you what you want?"

No. Only you. Only now.

He said nothing. 

He just closed his eyes, letting Seto catch the weight of his bowed head. Seto’s hands brought with them a fragrance of faded oils and a feeling, neither rough nor soft but unerring, pulling on that stray thread of truth until everything unraveled.

Seto pulled him forward. Through shallow darkness Atem felt the distant horizon storm of his presence – like sensing the grey, rolling approach of rain, a thundering gift for the dry, beseeching earth, smelling the electricity in the air – the slight, tentative crawling of his fingertips into his hair, as though unsure how to hold him, and then a brush of lips against his forehead, a gentle rainy smattering. A firm kiss to the center of his brow. Then two more, just under his left eye, like footsteps towards a sleeper. The fourth Seto pressed to his closed lips, slowly, carefully, in silent question, and because yes, Atem wanted it, he knew at least _that_ for certain, he opened his mouth and answered.

Seto wrapped his arms around him. They tilted sideways onto the cushions of the barge, their legs unfolding, and Atem fell into him.

* * *

They went for a swim in the River, frog-kicking into the shallows and holding their breaths under the lotuses, sunlight filtering through the water in clear shafts, the stalks forming a fibrous green hypostyle hall under the sprawling mandala roof of lotus leaves. They talked. They played senet until Seto won. They talked some more. Atem cocked an eyebrow, bit his lip. Seto smirked and threw him across the cushions. With every impact of their bodies, sparks cascaded between them, as though they couldn’t help but strike and make fire against each other. Atem hung his head over the edge of the barge, watching his own reflection, his own panting, slack-jawed expression, in the River below, the mirror refusing to ripple despite the rhythm of Seto’s thrusts, every one threatening to push Atem into the water with a delicious thrill of danger until Seto flipped him onto his back and filled his eyes with the wide blue sky and the bells of their laughter and pleasure rang off the cliffs of the River valley in resounding, echoing chorus. 

They returned late in the afternoon, when Amun-Re was nearing the Western horizon, the last waves of fiery champagne light rippling through the airy hallways of the palace in his wake. Atem was buoyant as they wandered the halls, with only half an aim in mind, their conversation equally wandering. Some of Seto’s newfound radiance had entered him, he felt, and they were taking it all back with them. 

“You don’t like the assassination plot?” he said, as they strolled down a tall colonnade through the gardens, the pillars casting long, grasping shadows across the still ponds.

"It has its charms,” Seto said. “I have no objections to a game whose premise is, ‘what do you do if someone tries to kill you?’ But the way Mahad planned the reveal is so uninspired. An assassin in the shadows? A poisoned goblet? A _dagger?_ As far as clichés go, it's not even an amusing cliché. It lacks... emphasis. An _impact."_

“Oh?” Atem said archly. “And you could plan a better assassination?”

“I _do_ make games for a living.”

“Enlighten me, o master game-maker. How would _you_ write the story?"

“I’d add more drama,” Seto said. “A focal point of emotion. The assassin can’t be some random stranger, some spy hidden in the dignitaries… I’d send someone to insert themselves in your court, to get close to you, befriend you…”

“Seduce me?” 

“Oh, maybe,” Seto said casually. “There is compelling pathos in a betrayal from someone you love."

“And how would you do that?” Atem said. Seto glanced at him and smiled, a dry, dangerous little smile. 

"You want me to play the assassin?"

"Do your worst."

“Well, I wouldn’t flatter you,” Seto said, moving closer. Atem moved backwards. “Not with words. It would all mean nothing next to your little chicken coop of sycophants. But the things I’d _do_ for you… I’d be the only one who does them.” 

Atem’s back hit a pillar, Seto’s hand landing silently on the curved stone beside his neck. 

“So? I had a lot of people who only do one thing for me,” Atem said, looking up, his vision filling with Seto’s bare chest, his sloping shoulders, his mischievous expression. “I had only one Master of Secrets of the Morning House, and all he did was preside over my morning toilette.”

“But what I do makes you feel like you’re the sun itself,” Seto said, “like you’re the center of the sky.”

“Oh. really. And then what?”

“And then when you least expect it – " Seto's other hand dropped to Atem's hip, a conspiratorial caress that made Atem bite his lip, his poker face fighting for life - "when you feel like you'd die without me... _that’s_ when I’d strike – "

With a swift, brisk movement, Seto hefted Atem up, arms snaking around his waist, holding him against the pillar. His stomach swooping with glee, Atem threw his legs around Seto’s hips, his arms around Seto’s neck, welcoming Seto’s sloppy, surging kiss – clinging to him as Seto dipped his head to kiss his neck, writing lines of the old love poems into his skin with a raw, slippery-sweet brush of tongue and lips and teeth – a ferocious blooming of soft, heady heat that made his eyes roll blindly over Seto’s shoulder, across the gardens...

“Seto – stop stop stop – Seto, it’s Mahad,” he gasped, giving Seto's hair two light yanks of warning where he had one hand tangled in it. Seto hastily dropped him on his feet.

Mahad was at the far end of the gardens, tending to his own private square. His head bobbed between the broad mitten-shaped leaves of a young fig tree. A low breeze rolled through the gardens and the leaves heaved like ocean whitecaps. Unlike all the others around the palace, it was a living garden: it still needed tending, weeding, the careful inspection of leaves for white spots of sickness and antagonistic insects. He hadn’t seen them. 

But Atem looked at Seto, asked the question without speaking, and Seto agreed with a nod.

They fixed their disheveled clothes and made their way across the gardens. He saw them through the leaves and stepped out, his hands speckled with fresh loam, a small pile of rot-mottled, crinkle-edged leaves at his feet. Something in their faces must have given him pause – his own face darkened with suspicion, like it did whenever Seto smiled like that.

“Mahad, I have to tell you something,” Atem said. 

“Yes, my Lord,” Mahad said. 

“When Seto returns to his dimension, I’m going with him.”

Mahad pinned a look on Seto, perfectly stoic save for the flickering chip of resentment in his eyes.

“This was your idea, I suppose?” he said. “You have never been less of a priest than you are now. You have no respect for the designs of our Gods.”

“My faith is as strong as it ever was,” Seto said loftily. “It just lies elsewhere now.”

A soft huff escaped Mahad’s nose. His dark, river-stone eyes swung to Atem. 

“My Lord... this is your home. This was made for you. There are those of us who waited for you.”

 _I made it for you_ , was the unspoken plea. _I waited._

“I know,” Atem said, “but I have a chance to – to find out what I really want. To do it instead of imagine it. To stop play-acting at being Pharaoh.”

“You _are_ a Pharaoh,” Mahad corrected. “You would choose a mortal life with him over this? Paradise? An eternity of Godhood? Why would you return to a world that hurts you?”

Atem glanced at Seto, waiting in silence at his side. He was here because he’d reached for what was most human inside him, broken himself open like a pomegranate, revealing the dripping, jewel-toned seeds under the leather-hard husk of his life: Longing. Anger. The grief of love. The hollowness of abandonment. Reunion, with nothing left to say except _this is the truth, this is how I feel._ Stripping the sweetness from the seeds with tongue and teeth and spitting out the fragments, swallowing only the splendor. 

“You know as well as I do that there is as much dignity and grace in being human as there is in being divine,” Atem said. “Maybe more.”

Mahad frowned, pulling wet loam off his own hands with long strokes, first one, then the other, flicking it down into the earth. With a sigh, his shoulders dropped, a surrender to the weight of all his waiting and the thought of more. 

“You really mean to leave?” he said, with a heavy voice. 

Atem steeled himself. “Yes.”

“And this is what you want. This is your final answer?”

He swung his hand sideways. Seto’s hand met it, their fingers lacing together, several glowing flakes drifting away from the seams of connection.

“Yes.”

Mahad inhaled, eyes grazing over Atem and Seto, and exhaled, wrapping his hands around Atem’s shoulders – with the resolve of an adviser – and then lifting his hands to cradle his face – with the affection of a friend. “Then... take my blessing, and – ”

“We’re not leaving _now._ We still have some time,” Atem said, his cheeks swelling into Mahad’s warm palms as he smiled. “And I’ll come back. Eventually. You know that.”

Mahad gave him a smile, in graceful concession. “I do.”

He released him, the echo of his touch suffusing Atem with warmth, satisfaction, gratitude. 

“Maybe by that time I’ll have grown a tomato,” Mahad said, and Atem laughed, backpedaling away with Seto, leaving him to his hopeful tending. His heart was light, floating again; there was time still for whatever blessing Mahad wanted to give him, and for a better good-bye. 

Once out of the gardens, in the insincere secrecy between some white, wafting curtains on a balcony, the air turning blue and gold with dusk and torchlight, he turned back to Seto. 

“I believe we were in the middle of something,” he said, taking Seto’s wrist, draping his hand on his shoulder. 

“Back to _that?”_ Seto said, sliding his hand around to the back of Atem’s neck despite his wry skepticism, a smooth and reverent touch.

“Oh yes,” Atem said, smiling, pulling him forward for a kiss. “This time, I’m not leaving anything unfinished.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thinking about Atem in Aaru and the literal world-building of Aaru fills me with eldritch questions, the answers might be too much for a mortal mind; so I let Seto ask them instead. He can have fun with that. Might be also time to admit that i'm a huge sucker for one character cradling another character's face between their hands, with tenderness and love <3
> 
> comments + kudos are always welcome! Thank you for reading!


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